TORONTO — It may not be her childhood dream of landing on Mars, but adventurer Kate Harris says she’s over the moon about being named this year’s winner of the RBC Taylor Prize.

Harris fought back tears as she accepted the non-fiction prize, worth $30,000, at a Toronto gala Monday for “Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Roads.”

Published by Knopf Canada, the book details Harris’s bicycle travels along the fabled network of trade routes connecting Asia and Europe.

“I’ve definitely landed on another world. I do not have my bearings here,” Harris, 36, said in an interview. “It’s extraordinary. You set off for one place, and you end up another entirely, and that’s part of the beauty of adventure and exploration, and it’s the beauty of writing as well.”

Growing up in small-town Ontario, Harris said she had written off Earth as being “old news,” with its paved arteries and tamed wilderness that had already been charted in maps by explorers before her, so she set her sights on galactic adventure.

Well along her way towards becoming a scientist fit for a space mission, Harris and a friend embarked on a bicycle trip down a stretch of the Silk Road.

At first, the trek just seemed like a way to pass the time before Harris launched into orbit. But as the Rhodes scholar returned to her studies at Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it dawned on her that there was plenty to discover on her home planet, so she decided to ditch the classroom for the wide-open road.

It took Harris 14 months of pedalling to retrace the Silk Road from beginning to end, but she said the true challenge came when she sat down to write about her travels.

Author Kate Harris, shown in a handout photo, has been awarded $30,000 as the winner of this year’s RBC Taylor Prize for “Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road.”THE CANADIAN PRESS

The cabin where Harris lives off the grid on the northern edge of British Columbia served as a picturesque backdrop for her five-year-long writing process, she said, providing her an escape from the solitary endeavour of putting words on the page.

“People are always stunned when I say that the book was a harder journey,” said Harris. “You yourself don’t know if the book’s going to come together in a meaningful way, so it is an adventure in the sense that you don’t know you’re going to get where you’re aiming to go.”

Taylor Prize jurors Camilla Gibb, Roy MacGregor and Beverley McLachlin, who culled this year’s shortlist from more than 100 titles, praised “Lands of Lost Borders” for changing “how one thinks about the world and the human compulsion to define it.”

For Harris, the beauty of travel is that it shakes her out of a sense of complacency, awakening her to wonders of the world, and she hopes her book has a similar transporting effect on readers.

“I wouldn’t turn down a return ticket to go visit (Mars), but my loyalties are here on this planet,” she said.

Harris beat out four other authors shortlisted for the prize, including Bill Gaston for “Just Let Me Look at You: On Fatherhood” (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Canada), Elizabeth Hay for “All Things Consoled: A Daughter’s Memoir” (McClelland &Stewart), Darrel McLeod for “Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age” (Douglas & McIntyre) and Ian Hampton for “Jan in 35 Pieces: A Memoir in Music” (Porcupine’s Quill).

Created in 1998 by the Charles Taylor Foundation, the literary prize awards finalists $5,000 each, with the winner taking home an additional $25,000.